18 Carat Affair – Adventures in Schizophrenia

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Originally posted to the SongSavers music blog on 28 April 2016.]

With the exception of a various artists compilation, Adventures in Schizophrenia by Missouri musician Denys Parker of 18 Carat Affair was the final release of Fortune 500 – one of the first professional vaporwave labels that sought to bring the genre outside of the realms of 4chan and message boards. This is no bombastic closer: Adventures in Schizophrenia is a downtempo plunderphonics album that bookends microsongs1 with white noise blips and imperfect editing, as if the listener is channel-surfing at witching hour through eighties music television. It’s druggy and intensely melodic in a chill-out room kind of way, with a preponderance of four-on-the-floor rhythms and simple electronic progressions (e.g. “Lying in Bermuda” and “Aladdin’s Lamp”).

Adventures in Schizophrenia is rather inconsistent due to the markedly different production levels per sample; it also suffers a common problem in genres that utilize the microsong, whereby in order to fulfill a self-ascribed run-time, there ends up being quite a bit of filler. It loses speed at the end, as if Parker were not sure whether he were producing a chill future funk album or a sound collage. Overall, not bad, but does not reward complete listens all that well.